Peak-period Tretchikoff painting leads auction week

A pinnacle work by Vladimir Tretchikoff, the much-loved Russian-born Cape Town painter whose vivid portraiture and canny marketing strategies prefigured Pop art, leads Strauss & Co’s September Auction Week (16 – 18 September 2024).

Painted circa 1954-56, Balinese Girl (estimate R5 – 7 million/ $278 520 – $390 000) derives from Tretchikoff’s classic period, when he originated such iconic works as Chinese Girl (1952) and Lady from Orient (1955).

“Balinese Girl is a commanding portrait of a very confident and elegant young woman rendered with nobility and grace by an artist at the height of his powers,” says Bina Genovese, Managing Executive, Strauss & Co. “Tretchikoff used a bluish-green colour palette to depict his youthful subject’s skin tone, a technique he reserved for only his most important portraits. It is a privilege to be handling this masterwork in the artist’s adopted hometown, Cape Town, where he settled in 1946, living a full and productive life.”

Balinese Girl draws strongly from Tretchikoff’s first-hand knowledge of Asia. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the artist lived in China, Singapore and Indonesia for various periods. Andrew Lamprecht, Curator of Historical Paintings and Sculpture at the Iziko South African National Gallery and a noted Tretchikoff expert, says of Balinese Girl: “Tretchikoff is at pains to present his sitter in a dignified pose, proudly bearing the costume and jewellery of her home country and in all, suffused by the beauty and sparkle of glamour. This is at a time when such subjects were often the subject of gross caricature and misrepresentation.”

Balinese Girl will be presented in Strauss & Co’s marquee Evening Sale of Modern and Contemporary Arton Tuesday, 17 September 2024, at 7pm. Also up for sale is Tretchikoff’s Chrysanthemums in an Oriental Vase (estimate R800 000 – 1.2 million / $44 510 – 66 765), a vertiginous flower composition owned by art collectors Mark and Elizabeth Harding from Kimberley. Rendered in the artist’s distinctive blue-green palette, Harding acquired this work in 1969 from a well-known art dealer in Durban, Payne Bros. It initiated a close relationship with the artist that enabled the Hardings to handpick exclusive works from the artist’s studio in 1973.

Interest in Tretchikoff’s work has not waned after his death in 2006, at age 92. Posthumous biographies and a 2011 museum exhibition in Cape Town have contributed to durable status at market. Adding further lustre to his standing, Chinese Girl, a nearly contemporaneous work to Balinese Girl, is on public display at Delaire Graff Estate, near Stellenbosch.

Collector demand for Tretchikoff has seen strong prices achieved for portraits and flower studies from his peak period of the late 1940s and 1950s. In 2023, Strauss & Co sold Still Life with Magnolias in a Vase, dated 1952, for R4.1 million / $229 000. Dated 1956 Tretchikoff’s portrait Zulu Maiden achieved R3.2 million / $177 070 at a 2015 sale. Strauss & Co has successfully offered 76 works by Tretchikoff since 2009, achieving a combined value of R51 / $ 2.8 million for sellers from 83% lots sold.

For more information, visit Strauss and Co’s website, watch the video or browse the e-catalogue.